Medical ultrasound systems are used by physicians and technicians in a variety of clinical situations to ultrasonically view organs and tissues within a patient's body. Although the ultrasound systems may be used sporadically in a hospital or other clinical setting, the systems are often left with the power on, ready for use by a physician or technician.
When the ultrasound system is left on with a high amplitude drive signal applied to the system's transducer, the power dissipation in the transducer is high. If the high power dissipation persists for prolonged time periods, the performance of the transducer degrades and the reliability of the transducer is diminished. In addition, ultrasound systems have high power consumption, making the systems expensive to operate. If a system is turned off in an effort to reduce power consumption, when the system is turned back on, a time delay may result before the system is again ready for use. The time delay may be caused by booting-up the system's software, by running self-diagnostic tests, or by waiting for components in the system to respond once power is applied.
In presently available ultrasound systems, power dissipation in the transducers may be reduced by decreasing the amplitude of the drive signal applied to the transducer. However, the reduced drive signal amplitude provides lower acoustic returns at the transducer which degrade the quality of the ultrasonic images produced by the ultrasound system.